New York City Discloses Teacher-Ranking Data After Court Ruling

Feb. 24 (Bloomberg) -- New York City released performance
ratings for 17,666 of its more than 70,000 teachers that are
based on student test scores and sociological variables, which
union officials and other critics called unreliable.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who released the
information today under a state appellate court order issued
last week, said he had fought attempts by the news media to
obtain the grades because of concerns for teachers’ privacy and
statistical imperfections that limit the data’s value.

“I don’t want our teachers disparaged in any way based on
this information,” Walcott told reporters during a briefing at
the Education Department’s offices near City Hall. “It’s old
data and it’s just one piece of information.”

The ratings are based on criteria that changed during three
school years, reflecting new approaches to evaluating teachers
and the switch to a different company after the 2007-2008 school
term.

They helped identify 133 teachers among 4,000 up for tenure
who consistently scored in the bottom 5 percent. Of those, 36
percent were granted tenure anyway, said Deputy Chancellor Shael
Polakow-Suransky, chief academic officer for the largest U.S.
school system. Principals have been asked to use the data for
about a fifth of their basis for evaluating a teacher’s
performance, Walcott said.

‘Flawed Formula’

The release triggered union protests including a newspaper
advertising campaign attacking the data’s reliability. The city
“has combined bad tests, a flawed formula and incorrect data to
mislead tens of thousands of parents,” United Federation of
Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said in a statement sent by
e-mail.

U.S. states and local school districts are developing data
systems to show how much individual teachers contribute to
student achievement. The aim: measuring pupils’ improvement
during their time in class, taking into account their skills
when they enter. Districts would then combine these measures
with more subjective evaluations, such as observation by
principals. It’s a shift from gauging teacher quality by the
number of years on the job or advanced degrees.

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, in a New York Times
op-ed article this week, called the release of the New York City
data a “big mistake.”

“Putting sophisticated personnel systems in place is going
to take a serious commitment,” he wrote. “Those who believe we
can do it on the cheap -- by doing things like making individual
teachers’ performance reports public -- are underestimating the
level of resources needed to spur real improvement.”

Margin of Error

In New York, when determining a teacher’s rank in comparison
with peers, the scores on average contain a 35 percentage-point
margin of error for math teachers and a 53 percentage-point
margin of error for English teachers in middle school. Depending
on an educator’s experience and number of students in class, the
error margins could be as high as 75 percentage points in math
and 87 points in English, Polakow-Suransky said.

In 2010, more than a dozen media companies filed requests
under the state Freedom of Information Law seeking teacher-performance data from the Education Department. The UFT sued the
city to prevent the release. Earlier this month, the state’s
highest court refused to hear an appeal of an earlier ruling
requiring disclosure.

Last month, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned
that New York state would have to return $700 million if it
didn’t fulfill its promise to President Barack Obama’s Race to
the Top program to implement teacher evaluations. The president,
a Democrat, has proposed $5 billion in incentives for states and
school districts to tie teacher pay to performance as part of
his $69.8 billion education-budget proposal.

The Education Department is part of the administration of
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg
News parent Bloomberg LP.